From what I’m seeing, 3590 Bs are rated at 9MB/s, Es and Hs are rated at 14MB/s.

We’re currently having a similar problem, although, to a much lesser extent. We have 3570 Cs that run at 7MB/s. It’s an aging drive, and slow. Since we’re looking to replace the drive anyway, we’re looking at LTO1, 2, or 3 as options. LTO1s run at 15MB/s, 2s run at 35MB/s, and 3s run at I believe 70MB/s

You’ll probably want to take a look at LTO, particularly if you have IBM service on your 3590 drive. From what I’ve been reading, in a lot of cases, you can move from a magstar to a LTO drive, and be paying less in payments, and service contract then you’re currently paying for the older hardware’s service contract.

BTW: I’m not sure if there’s anything better then LTO out there. We’ve just started reviewing our options, and the LTOs jumped out at me as a good solution for us, even though we’d end up with a lot of empty space on the tapes.

I assume that you only have 1 3590. The only way I know would be to save the library to a savefile first, if you have enough open DASD. That should run quicker than the tape save and you can then make the two tape saves from the savefile while QINTER is up.
LTOs are great drives but be sure your hardware can support the rated speeds of the LTO2 or 3, especially your controller card.

Create a savf – end qinter – startbackup to savf – finished? – start qinter – start backup savf to tape as many times you want. or not enough diskspace for savf? start backup to tape once, then start qinter and do a duptap.

at 5.4 it is possible to do saves to virtual tapedevices….but you’ll need diskspace for that.

Regards,
Rene Breedveld

Is there a reason you can’t use SAVACT w/*SYNCLIB? If you absolutely have to have everyone out of QINTER, you could end the subsystem, SAVLIB with SAVACT > *SYNCLIB SAVACTWAIT > 05. As soon as you receive the Check point processing complete message…start QINTER and let everyone back on. Your save to tape will take the same amount of time but but your downtime would probably be around 5 minutes. We went from a 3490, to Magstar and are now using 2 LTO’s which allows us to duplicate our save tapes.

Is there a reason you can’t use SAVACT w/*SYNCLIB? If you absolutely have to have everyone out of QINTER, you could end the subsystem, SAVLIB with SAVACT > *SYNCLIB SAVACTWAIT > 05. As soon as you receive the Check point processing complete message…start QINTER and let everyone back on. Your save to tape will take the same amount of time but but your downtime would probably be around 5 minutes. We went from a 3490, to Magstar and are now using 2 LTO’s which allows us to duplicate our save tapes.